Sophocles and His Work

Sophocles occupies a pre-eminent position in the history of Greek tragedy. As a poet, dramatist, and thinker, he combined the spiritual depth of his age with a mastery of form that permanently altered the course of Western literature. Born around 496 BCE in Colonus, near Athens, Sophocles lived through a period of extraordinary political, cultural, and intellectual vitality. The fifth century BCE witnessed the establishment of democracy, the flowering of philosophy, and the triumph of Athenian power. In this setting, tragedy emerged as the supreme artistic expression of human experience—a form in which questions of morality, fate, and divine justice were enacted before a civic audience. Sophocles, standing between the grandeur of Aeschylus and the psychological subtlety of Euripides, represented the perfect balance of intellect, artistry, and humanity. His surviving works, though few, constitute a corpus of immense moral and aesthetic power, through which the ancient Greek conception of the human condition continues to speak with undiminished urgency.